The 1990's decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs.
In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the Internet or Web for years, offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources that were at first text and then evolved into media, i.e. “hypermedia”. This even further exploded the use of the Internet or Web. It was now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to spend literally hours going through document after document in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strained the users' time and resources. It has been generally agreed that in order for the Web or Internet to continue its great expansion, it will be necessary for the Web to greatly reduce its drain on time and related resources. A significant source of this drain is in the Web page (the basic document page of the Web) itself.
In the case of Web pages, we do not have the situation of a relatively small group of professional designers working out the human factors. Rather, in the era of the Web, anyone and everyone can design a Web page. Pages are frequently designed by developers without usability skills. As a result, Web pages are frequently set up and designed in an eclectic manner. Often Web pages are set up through loose business, professional, social and educational configurations with general trade or public input of Web pages. The names or identifiers selected for the hyperlinks by Web page hosts or authors are often very similar to each other. As a result, the user going through one or a series of Web searches or browses will find it virtually impossible to recognize the more important hyperlinks to significant Web documents and pages. Thus, the user may spend considerable time going around in circles. The providers of Web searches have addressed this problem by providing users with the capability of bookmarking of Web documents/pages that may be of particular future interest to the user. Web browsers, which have been available for over a decade as a Web document search and access tools, have provided users with this capability of bookmarking and thereby saving Web documents. Bookmarking stores at a receiving display station direct links to the bookmarked documents and pages for future access so that the user may avoid cumbersome locating and addressing of the Web documents.
While bookmarks have been a significant means of time savings on the Web, the use and need for bookmarks among heavy users of the Web has expanded to the point that such users are encountering difficulty in keeping track of the Web documents or page that they have bookmarked. The confusing similarities between names of hyperlinks mentioned above together with the great increase in numbers of user bookmarked documents has made it exceedingly difficult for the user to recognize which hyperlinks in a displayed received Web page or document is a link to an already bookmarked document. This confronts the user with the frequent tedious task of sorting through his existing bookmarks. Worse yet, the user may end up with multiple bookmarks to the same Web documents, which even further compounds the problem.